Why do you think it’s an either/or? It isn’t at all.

Besides, sync was always monetized, and everyone that was asking/begging Dawson to migrate the app knew that. The only people surprised are people that didn’t use it to begin with, and aren’t going to use it now.

Were you not a reddit user, or a third party app user? Like, most of the reddit apps were Monetized in some way. Apollo, the app that was the tipping point for the reddit rage was heavily monetized, and people were begging Christian to port it over.

The whole thing is crazy. If a given person wants to use it and pay for it, that’s their business. Dawson did nothing bad by porting the app, or monetizing it from the beginning. How many great apps have fucked up by not monetizing from the beginning? Look at pushbullet and how it started so great, but then had to backpeddle and increase monetizing, only to alienate users because it was a change.

I’m sorry you don’t like capitalism, and I’m sorry we’re stuck inside it too. But an app like this is a pretty time intensive thing. You either kill your spare time working on it as a hobby, or you monetize so you can avoid how much time it sucks from you by not having to work on other things.